Root cellars, sacred stones, and timeless connection

Carolyn North is a writer of books that address "the interface between matter and spirit." She submits this piece in memory of Pamela Mayer, the founder of the Manitou Project in Williamsville. North's book Voices Out of Stone covers her experience with the stones in Kercado in more detail and is available at carolynnorthbooks.com.

PUTNEY-A good friend, knowing recently that I was going through a hard time with Covid, offered encouragement by sending me a poem by Rumi:

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round

in another form. The child weaned from mother's milk

now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,

from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.

As roses, up from ground.

Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,

now a cliff covered with vines,

now a horse being saddled.

It hides within these,

till one day it cracks them open.

Somehow, "the unmarked boxes" reminded me of the root cellars that dot the woods here in New England - as they also do in many other parts of the world.

As a stone hound myself, I have found similar stone chambers in France, in Ireland and in England that look identical to Vermont's root cellars, so I would guess that Vermont's might not have originally been built for storing onions and potatoes.

Actually, the stone chambers in New England's woods are almost identical to dolmens, or passage graves, found all over Europe and elsewhere in the world, and although the stones themselves cannot be carbon-dated, objects found within these chambers can be. The one I know best, Kercado, in Brittany, France, has been carbon dated to 5200 BCE!

* * *

Long before I moved to Vermont from California, I spent a summer here during the AIDS crisis, at the invitation of Pam Mayer for a stint in the Manitou woods, at the 225-acre forest sanctuary she created near Williamsville.

Where I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, so many people had been stricken with AIDS - 2 of my closest friends among them - that I was exhausted from trying to save them.

As it happened, Pam's daughter Lisby and I were good friends in Berkeley, so during one of Pam's visits to California, Lisby brought her over. At the door, I already felt kin with her when she quoted from one of my books, starting out our friendship with a warm hug.

Over tea, we talked about AIDS and healing, about the role of the natural world in human health, about spirit and the body, and she told me about Manitou.

By the end of our visit, I was invited to come to Vermont to rest and recover in the Manitou woods, and to heal my own ongoing heartbreak.

"Healers also need healing," Pam declared, "and we have a safe place for you to do so."

So I came, and Manitou and Pam provided the blessed sanctuary I so badly needed.

* * *

Day after day, wandering the woods, napping in patches of sun, sitting on fallen logs, and sniffing the delicate fungi, I listened to the understory whispers.

Pam was right - solitude and living woods were what I needed. I walked the trails and sat by running brooks for hours on end; I walked the labyrinth; I breathed in green green moss and climbed to the High Place. I rested.

And then, one day in my wanderings, I came upon a jumble of stones that formed a wooded rise alongside the trail. It was covered in leaves and fallen branches, and I stopped to get a closer look, because I sensed something familiar about it, hints of a pattern I had seen before.

Edges, bits of walls - all were piled helter-skelter on the ground, and there in the center was something reminiscent of a capstone, and above it a rock lintel. Where had I seen this before? Felt this before?

At megalithic sites in England, in France, on the Isles of Scilly.

I ran to find Pam, brought her through the woods to the site, and excitedly pointed out what I'd found. She stood for a while, silent, then we gazed at each other and then again at the rock pile, confirming that it was not just my imagination.

"I've walked this trail how many times?" she mused. "How could I have missed it?"

She doused the site with her pendulum and, indeed, it spun vigorously in the area of the fallen capstone. I recall that we laughed a bit nervously and then climbed the rubble, found some stones flat and stable enough to perch upon, and sat down to meditate.

* * *

I do not know for how long we sat there in silence just listening to the place. Aware of the sigh of every leaf-fall and every image that came into my mind, I simply waited and listened for I knew not what.

Pam told me later that she asked for information about how to proceed; we each asked how we might use whatever Earth wisdom we were tapping into here.

Each of us received hints, in fact, that were astonishingly relevant - even specific - to each of our lives!

It gives me shivers even now to recall the magic of that hour, and discovering that a spider had literally bonded us while we sat in stillness, weaving a perfect web between our shoulders. It was magic, with a sense of humor!

Our laughter broke the delicate strands of the web, and we took it as a blessing.

* * *

This was not my first encounter with mysterious stone chambers, having spent two years in Europe studying medieval art history in both France and England.

With friends, I often went out exploring medieval churches and the mysterious stones circles and barrows that dot the countryside. That was before crop circles began appearing there, before an ancient pyramid had been excavated in Bosnia, before Göbekli Tepe had been unearthed in Turkey.

Actually, stone sites have been found all over the world - Japan, Russia, even the American continent, in places we have not thought to look before. Or particularly notice - like the mysterious alignments of standing stones in Brittany, France, that dated back to times we had no history for.

I was hooked.

Years later, I made a solo pilgrimage to Brittany in northwestern France, to the village of Carnac on the Quiberon peninsula, a tiny village on the Golfe du Morbihan that has perhaps the highest concentration of megaliths anywhere in the world.

Alignments of standing stones, 12 rows across and 3 miles long and dated long before even Stonehenge, march across the countryside in parallel lines. Sheep graze among them, and the occasional croft (a small rented farm) is built incorporating them, but otherwise they have simply been part of the landscape, although recently scholars and tourists have begun paying attention.

When I first arrived in Carnac, I had the alignments mostly to myself, most tourists preferring the beaches. Day after day, I wandered the silent rows of stones, taking naps on flat capstones and writing in my notebook. I learned the history of the region, reading accounts of how these stones had once been considered works of the Devil, and how much was once destroyed by the church.

But even after years of such pillage, hundreds of stones still stand in the alignments, as well as in churchyards, forests, and pastures all over Brittany - all over Europe, in fact.

One dolmen standing right in the middle of the alignments forms the back wall of a small dwelling later built on that spot; tucked into one stone circle, another cottage was still lived in when I was there in the 1980s.

On one jaunt through the countryside, I came upon a massive megalith right in the center of a farmyard, and I stopped to talk with the farmer.

"Do you know how old this menhir is?" I asked

"Oh, c'est très, très vieux," he replied. "It is very, very old! It was even here when my grandfather was born!"

I will always cherish that memory.

* * *

But right here in Windham County where, for me, similar energies are very strong, I also find shaped stones built into cellar walls, on front door lintels, and the remains of root cellars that mysteriously keep tools sharp and root vegetables cool, and I have to wonder: Who put them there - and when?

These root cellars are almost identical to ones I have seen and studied in Brittany - like Kercado. To find it, I had to bushwack. But once there, I felt greeted - even expected.

"Listen," I seemed to hear, so I stowed my backpack against a tree and settled down to do just that.

I pulled out my notebook to write them down. Words and then whole thought-forms began to flow, answering my unspoken questions: Why am I here? What called me? What is your purpose?

I sat up with attention, and a torqued muscle in my right calf - a long-ago injury - started to throb. The pain became intense, and I broke down crying and massaging my lower leg as the muscle gradually released its grip for the first time in years. I found myself choking on old pain, recalling childhood harm.

I swallowed hard, shivered uncontrollably, sobbing. What in the world had I walked into?

"Breathe," I heard then. "Come back tomorrow."

What? I was listening to a stone? In the woods, in France, above thousands of other stones? What in the world was going on?

But I came back the next day, and the next, both morning and afternoon, for the whole time I was there.

In those two weeks I learned more about myself and more about deep healing than I had through any practices available in the medicine of the time.

* * *

I wonder if Windham County and environs is an energy vortex on the earth's surface, similar to Brittany. Could that be true of other ancient stone sites around the world, as well? Was Pam conscious of this possibility when she began purchasing wooded land around her home in Williamsville?

Wonders will happen; synchronicities happen every day, and unexpected magic seems to be alive and well. May it be so as we head into a world-changing election.

I, myself, would like to gather all the magic I can, and to bring Pam's magic back to life for a while, perhaps even go back to Manitou to sit upon that magic pile of rocks, not far from where I now live, having come back here to live out my days on this magical land.

This Voices Essay was submitted to The Commons.

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